Jessica Hinds (Canwest News Service) – Two organizations are urging Canadian police and security agencies to record why they make such decisions as pulling people over.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation recommend in a joint statement that Canadian policing and security agencies record such characteristics as race, age and gender after they make such decisions as sending someone to a secondary search or pulling someone out of a line at a border crossing.
This would be done to understand whether profiling based on such grounds as race is occurring, and to prevent profiling by making police and security forces responsible for recording their decisions.
Such data is already collected in several countries including the U.S,. the organizations report.
The statement came after a Universite de Moncton study commissioned by the organizations found there is insufficient evidence to prove that profiling based on the prohibited grounds in the Canadian Human Rights Act is an effective policing tool.
These prohibited grounds include race, national or ethnic origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability and conviction for which a pardon has been granted.
“The idea behind collecting data is that every time that there is a discretionary decision made by a police officer, by a border agent, that they identify what that discretionary decision was. So for example if they’re stopping somebody, or sending them to secondary search at the border they identify . . . who they are sending, and the reason why they’re sending them to secondary search,” said Maciej Karpinski a senior research analyst at the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
Ayman Al-Yassini executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation said that the specifics of how police and security agencies go about collecting the data would be up to them.
“Some may say that it’s time consuming, well the answer to that is compared to the benefits we will be getting out of it as a society as a whole, as agencies, the time factor really is not a major one,” he said.
“We will be looking at how to respond appropriately to this request,”said the RCMP in a statement. “In our Mission, Vision and Values statement the RCMP declares its commitment to unbiased and respectful treatment of all people. We also developed a bias-free policing policy in 2005 that specifically instructs employees not to engage in racial profiling. The RCMP does not target communities or people, it targets criminal activity.”
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